Some Great Western Railway Information
A selection of drawings of locomotives, coaches and goods wagons and other related information.
An Introduction to Great Western Locomotive Development
My introductory study of GWR steam locomotive classes is
now available.You
may order it from here. Its intended to fall somewhere between
the RCTS books, now long out of print, and Russell's books of
illustrations.
"...an extremely useful single point of reference"
-
Adrian Knowles - Great Western Echo
Unfortunately I and others have detected the occasional error, and I have prepared an errata sheet. If you have any corrections to add please contact me using one of the links at the foot of the page.
Short Studies of GWR Topics
- British Historic Loading Gauges
- Route Availability on British railways in the steam era
- The scrapping of "North Star" and "Lord of the Isles"
- A Beginner's Guide to Large Prairie Tanks
- A Guide to identifying the GWR 4-6-0 Classes
- A Beginner's Guide to GWR Standard Boilers
- Typical Arrangements of Reversing Gear on GWR Locomotives
- Valve Gear components on Standard 2 cylinder classes
- Wild tales about the high speed test of 2903 Lady of Lyons in 1906
Sketches by the Author
I created this series of drawings to illustrate development and
variations caused by boiler changes and other developments in various
classes and to illustrate some pieces I have written as features for
the GWR Modelling Website.
They are worked up from the GWR Diagrams, so they have all their
limitations and more besides. For more information about the
limitations of these sketches see this page
about how I created them.
Flights of Fancy
Having made all these drawings I have a considerable library of GWR components. On various occasions I hae been unable to resist the temptation to rearrange them into something different.
Official GWR Weight Diagrams
The GWR weight diagrams which were hosted here were orginally compiled by John Daniel on his excellent site Great Western Archive but were unavailable for a while and so members of the GWR Elist reassembled the collection. As the original collection is now available again it seems best to point people back at the originals as we were never able to contact Mr. Daniel to ask his permission to reproduce them here.
I have learned that its easy to be seduced by the quality of the draughtsmanship of the original GWR drawings into supposing that these Weight Diagrams comprise a suitable reference for modellers. This doesn't seem to be the case. Even at my level of competence I can detect inconsistencies - safety valve covers are rarely symmetrical for instance - and even distortions. Some of these probably came in various reproductions along the way, but some seem to me to be original. I am not a trained engineer, nor do I know much about heavy engineering practice, but I am quite sure that all manufacture was done from the numerous detailed drawings of each component, and that whilst you can almost certainly trust the dimensions written on drawings, scaling dimensions from them should be done with extreme caution.
- GWR Locomotive Drawings (Link to the Great Western Archive)
- GWR Railmotor, Railcar, Coach & Passenger Stock Drawings (Link to the Great Western Archive)
- GWR Wagon & Freight Stock Drawings (Link to the Great Western Archive)
